# spiceai/spiceai

Add a real-time analytics node to your operational database. Spice is a portable, accelerated SQL query, search, and LLM-inference engine in Rust for data-grounded AI apps and agents.

Repository: https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/spiceai
Homepage: https://docs.spiceai.org
Language: Rust
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: artificial-intelligence, developers, machine-learning, data, sql, infrastructure, data-federation, full-text-search, llm-inference
Last push: 2026-08-26T22:24:07+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 95/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:39:23.370411+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 87, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 1851, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": 9, "gap_med": 6.0, "n_releases_24m": 89}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 3070, forks 222 (observed 2026-08-28T04:07:41.540212+00:00)

## What it is
Spice.ai OSS is a portable Rust runtime (~140 MB binary) that combines federated SQL querying, accelerated data materialization, full-text and vector search, and OpenAI-compatible LLM inference in a single engine. It runs as a sidecar next to your application or as a distributed cluster, exposing SQL, search, OpenAI-compatible, Iceberg catalog, and MCP APIs over HTTP, Arrow Flight, ODBC/JDBC/ADBC.

## Use cases
- query multiple databases and data lakes with one SQL interface
- accelerate slow database queries with local caching and materialized views
- add vector and full-text search to my application data
- serve local LLM inference with an OpenAI-compatible API
- build a RAG application grounded in my own data
- keep analytics tables in sync with MySQL or PostgreSQL in real time via CDC
- expose my data and tools to AI agents via MCP
- query Apache Iceberg catalogs through a unified REST API

## When to choose
- you need millisecond-latency SQL and AI inference next to your app without building pipelines
- you want federated queries across databases, warehouses, and data lakes from one runtime
- you need combined SQL, vector search, BM25 full-text search, and LLM serving in a single lightweight binary
- you want real-time CDC acceleration of MySQL or PostgreSQL data without Kafka infrastructure
- you're building data-grounded AI apps or agents and want OpenAI SDK compatibility plus MCP tool integration

## When to avoid
- you only need a simple embedded database or ORM inside one application
- you need a full distributed OLAP warehouse with heavy multi-node scaling beyond Spice's cluster model
- your stack is strictly non-SQL or you don't want to run an additional sidecar service
- you need a managed turnkey solution and don't want to self-host or manage the runtime

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: active
- function: database, search-engine, vector-database, llm-inference, rag, caching, mcp, api-framework, etl, streaming
- domain: databases, large-language-models, analytics, developer-tools
- platform: rust, self-hosted, cloud, cross-platform, cli
- tags: data-federation, sql-query-engine, arrow-flight, datafusion, duckdb, cdc, mysql-binlog, iceberg-catalog, openai-compatible-api, bm25-full-text-search, sidecar-runtime, data-acceleration, materialized-views, tantivy, local-model-serving, search, retrieval-augmented-generation, data-engineering, ai-agents, docker, gpu, web-server

## Member repositories
- spiceai/spiceai (main) score 95

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:41.540212+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T07:28:09.453762+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/spiceai/spiceai (fetched 2026-08-28T04:07:41.540212+00:00, sha 6420c972510f)
  - homepage: https://docs.spiceai.org (fetched 2026-08-29T09:43:30.145091+00:00, sha 3676e17cebe0)
  - site_page: https://spiceai.org/docs/api/overview (fetched 2026-08-29T09:43:30.152116+00:00, sha 0e4532797d69)
  - site_page: https://spiceai.org/docs/reference/sql (fetched 2026-08-29T09:43:30.158870+00:00, sha b67a6270f538)
  - site_page: https://spiceai.org/docs/next (fetched 2026-08-29T09:43:30.160559+00:00, sha 416e51c8d06b)
  - site_page: https://spiceai.org/docs/v2.1 (fetched 2026-08-29T09:43:30.162300+00:00, sha c8487907a738)
  - site_page: https://spiceai.org/docs/v2.0 (fetched 2026-08-29T09:43:30.163847+00:00, sha 3416b317f6f3)
  - site_page: https://spiceai.org/docs/v1.11 (fetched 2026-08-29T09:43:30.165464+00:00, sha b0df0336922b)
  - site_page: https://spiceai.org/releases/v2.2.0 (fetched 2026-08-29T09:43:30.147905+00:00, sha 9abe9dd0e424)
  - site_page: https://spiceai.org/releases (fetched 2026-08-29T09:43:30.153894+00:00, sha 4d56139b11bf)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.